A master of the relationship between vowels and chakras - something our old friend Kay Gardner knew all about - in 1978 Munich-born Hamel looked at the world of avant-garde, jazz and pop music and deduced a trend toward a more soul-oriented, introverted musical language. Now, whether that’s right or not is, as so many other things, open to as many interpretations as you care to indulge in, but what’s certain is while keyboard player/synthesist Hamel may have once been lumped in with a lot of other New Age composers, he has always been able to transcend genre and create music with real depth and purpose.
A truly visionary sort of chap, Hamel emerged from the progressive end of the Krautrock scene at the very start of the 1970s. A wildly talented composer, his group Between (named after his dream of “the blue flower growing between the milestones on the road to a future world-music”, obvs) recorded a handful of wonderful albums before Hamel went solo. A theorist obsessed with Indian classical music, free jazz and the meditative experience of self-exploration, Hamel’s 1980 LP Colours Of Time is an absolute masterpiece of skull-bursting, synth-led ambient-minimalism. It’s pointless me telling you about what each track sounds like as both 20-minute (or so) pieces go, “widdly-diddly-ohhhhmmmm-oooohhhhhh” in the most wonderful and enlightening way. The following year’s Bardo is more classical, more ecclesiastical even, suffused with high church drama and stained-glass gloriousness. All instrumental, no choruses, nothing to whistle, just a lot of brain-stroking beauty. Pull the curtains, lie flat on your back, whack the headphones on and drift away to somewhere between east and west, up and down, day and night.